Steve Backshall travels the world looking for adventure – but his latest holiday was spent much closer to home
Claire Webb - 10 September 2019
Close encounters with deadly animals and extraordinary physical feats are all in a day’s work for Steve Backshall, but even he admits that his latest TV series “flew too close to the wind”. In Expedition, he attempts ten world firsts, including descents of unmapped rivers and unexplored cave systems, and the ascent of an Arctic mountain and a desert cliff.
While filming the series, he came face to face with a polar bear and the world’s most dangerous snake, but the closest call came while he was kayaking down a river in Bhutan that, according to local legend, “drops off the face of the planet”. Aerial photographs revealed the river plummets dramatically, disappearing into sheer gorges. Backshall got trapped in a rapid and spent five minutes thrashing around in the dark, thinking he was going to drown. “Around 20 tonnes of water per second were thundering through the rapid,” he recalls. “I was very, very lucky to get out unscathed. It was really hard getting back in the next day, having come that close to something really bad happening.”
Expedition was the fulfilment of a childhood dream and a 20-year project. He is 46 now; as a child, he desperately wished he’d been born in the golden age of explorers. “My parents are great travellers and both worked for British Airways, so when I was a kid I went to all parts of the world on free tickets – one of the perks of the job. When I was six or seven, I went on my first safari. I can remember looking at the guide and thinking: ‘That’s what I want to do.’ I was blown away by the idea that it was something you could do as a job.’’
After university he was writing Rough Guide travel books when he had an idea for a TV programme. “I bought a video camera, went to Colombia and filmed myself living in the rainforest for six weeks, catching snakes, spiders and scorpions; I sold it to National Geographic. That was in 1998, and I’ve been doing this ever since.”
As he embarked on his TV expeditions, he realised there was plenty of exploration still to be done, thanks in part to new technology. “For 20 years, every contact I ever met I’d grill, in search of secret sites and possible leads,” he writes in his new book to accompany the series. “I kept a filing cabinet filled with folders marked ‘Yamal Peninsula – mammoth carcasses and dog sledding tribes’, ‘Aleutians – first open sea crossing’, and ‘Kuril Islands by kayak’ – all stuffed with photos and articles, email addresses and business cards. None of the projects could be found on Google. Some of the rivers, caves and peaks couldn’t even be seen in satellite imagery.”
While Backshall was hatching his grand plans, he never imagined that the biggest challenge would be being so far from home. His wife, two-time Olympic champion rower Helen Glover, gave birth to their first child, Logan, in the break between the first and second expeditions.
“It was really hard being away from Helen and Logan, and in places where it’s not always possible to contact home. I got more homesick on this project than I had done ever. It ground me down. Kids change so quickly in the first year, you feel like you’ll miss something if you miss a day – to miss almost a year was brutal.”
Does Helen share his love of adventure? “She’s more hardcore than I am. She’s incredibly fit, very driven. Given the opportunity, she would be away on all of these expeditions in a heartbeat – and would flourish on them.”
However, because Backshall worries about his carbon footprint, this year the couple stayed close to home. “We went to Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly – a piece of paradise just off the Cornish coast. It’s a little bit like going back in time to a nicer age. We absolutely loved it. In fact, we’re going back in September. We’re leaving Logan with Helen’s mum for four days, which will be the longest she’s spent away from him, and we’ll be camping and kayaking out at sea with seals and dolphins. It’s a blissful way of exploring little coves and the most perfect beaches imaginable.”
A firm believer that parents should encourage children’s sense of adventure, Backshall’s already looking forward to taking Logan on family expeditions. “To do things like wildlife watching, free diving and sea kayaking with him would make me very happy. I’m definitely not going to push him towards adventure, but he will certainly have every opportunity to do that – and I would be over the moon if that’s how he wanted to spend his life.”
Close encounters with deadly animals and extraordinary physical feats are all in a day’s work for Steve Backshall, but even he admits that his latest TV series “flew too close to the wind”. In Expedition, he attempts ten world firsts, including descents of unmapped rivers and unexplored cave systems, and the ascent of an Arctic mountain and a desert cliff.
While filming the series, he came face to face with a polar bear and the world’s most dangerous snake, but the closest call came while he was kayaking down a river in Bhutan that, according to local legend, “drops off the face of the planet”. Aerial photographs revealed the river plummets dramatically, disappearing into sheer gorges. Backshall got trapped in a rapid and spent five minutes thrashing around in the dark, thinking he was going to drown. “Around 20 tonnes of water per second were thundering through the rapid,” he recalls. “I was very, very lucky to get out unscathed. It was really hard getting back in the next day, having come that close to something really bad happening.”
Expedition was the fulfilment of a childhood dream and a 20-year project. He is 46 now; as a child, he desperately wished he’d been born in the golden age of explorers. “My parents are great travellers and both worked for British Airways, so when I was a kid I went to all parts of the world on free tickets – one of the perks of the job. When I was six or seven, I went on my first safari. I can remember looking at the guide and thinking: ‘That’s what I want to do.’ I was blown away by the idea that it was something you could do as a job.’’
After university he was writing Rough Guide travel books when he had an idea for a TV programme. “I bought a video camera, went to Colombia and filmed myself living in the rainforest for six weeks, catching snakes, spiders and scorpions; I sold it to National Geographic. That was in 1998, and I’ve been doing this ever since.”
As he embarked on his TV expeditions, he realised there was plenty of exploration still to be done, thanks in part to new technology. “For 20 years, every contact I ever met I’d grill, in search of secret sites and possible leads,” he writes in his new book to accompany the series. “I kept a filing cabinet filled with folders marked ‘Yamal Peninsula – mammoth carcasses and dog sledding tribes’, ‘Aleutians – first open sea crossing’, and ‘Kuril Islands by kayak’ – all stuffed with photos and articles, email addresses and business cards. None of the projects could be found on Google. Some of the rivers, caves and peaks couldn’t even be seen in satellite imagery.”
While Backshall was hatching his grand plans, he never imagined that the biggest challenge would be being so far from home. His wife, two-time Olympic champion rower Helen Glover, gave birth to their first child, Logan, in the break between the first and second expeditions.
“It was really hard being away from Helen and Logan, and in places where it’s not always possible to contact home. I got more homesick on this project than I had done ever. It ground me down. Kids change so quickly in the first year, you feel like you’ll miss something if you miss a day – to miss almost a year was brutal.”
Does Helen share his love of adventure? “She’s more hardcore than I am. She’s incredibly fit, very driven. Given the opportunity, she would be away on all of these expeditions in a heartbeat – and would flourish on them.”
However, because Backshall worries about his carbon footprint, this year the couple stayed close to home. “We went to Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly – a piece of paradise just off the Cornish coast. It’s a little bit like going back in time to a nicer age. We absolutely loved it. In fact, we’re going back in September. We’re leaving Logan with Helen’s mum for four days, which will be the longest she’s spent away from him, and we’ll be camping and kayaking out at sea with seals and dolphins. It’s a blissful way of exploring little coves and the most perfect beaches imaginable.”
A firm believer that parents should encourage children’s sense of adventure, Backshall’s already looking forward to taking Logan on family expeditions. “To do things like wildlife watching, free diving and sea kayaking with him would make me very happy. I’m definitely not going to push him towards adventure, but he will certainly have every opportunity to do that – and I would be over the moon if that’s how he wanted to spend his life.”